January 3, 2014

I had cut ninth-grade percussion class three weeks straight. But the top-floor music room overlooked the court where I was foolishly playing basketball, and my teacher summoned me from the window.

He was an easygoing guy in his 20s who had the students call him by his first name, Scott, so the incident registered as comic blunder rather than punishable transgression. Yet he reminded me that it was my turn for the in-class project — others had given oral reports on famous jazz drummers, for instance. I’d completely forgotten about the assignment.

I was having a little trouble in school. Not only was I unhappy for all the standard freshman reasons — I was insecure, nervous around girls, unsure who my friends were — but I was also devolving into an indifferent student. Whereas academics came so easily to me before, certain high-school classes required real work, and I couldn’t coast anymore.

“Turn over a new leaf, kid,” my Latin teacher advised me kindly in class one day when I joked that my canis ate my homework.

Illustration by Melinda Josie

Even in percussion, which I previously excelled at, I plateaued at an intermediate rock beat as others mastered samba rhythms. I responded to my middling performance with apathy. If I wasn’t going to be the effortless best, I wasn’t going to try. I wasn’t the common slacker, I believed; I was an ambitious slacker, someone who aggressively squandered his potential. And now I stood empty-handed and perspiring before five drum students. My mind swerved to biology, in which we recently completed creative research projects and which I was in danger of flunking.

“My project’s in my locker,” I told Scott.

He excused me. In the adjacent open music room, the jazz band was taking a break from practicing. I approached my friend Doug from my bio class.

“Can I borrow your bio project?” I whispered.

He consented, and I ran to our empty science lab. The wall displayed the work my classmates spent weeks fashioning, including a top student’s tile-mosaic rendering of a multicellular organism and my crudely penciled cartoon — don’t ask why — about the mythical basilisk. It had taken me 15 minutes. I got a D.

Doug had written about the Alaskan ecosystem; his project was a circular piece of leather ringed by thin wood, with a beaded depiction of an ice fisherman on the front. I grabbed it and scurried back to class, my heart drumrolling in my chest.

“It’s an Alaskan Inuit drum,” I announced.

Scott examined the object like a skeptical appraiser. The leather was not even taut. It produced as much sound as lightly pressing your forearm.

Teddy Wayne

Christine Mladic

“Unfortunately, the leather didn’t dry out properly,” I explained with apologetic disappointment. I kept a straight face as I dispensed ethnographic details about how the Inuit played the drums to commemorate milestones, celebrate hunts and entertain themselves. This was a progressive school in New York City. No one dared question my information about an ethnic group. And none of the other students were in my bio class.

“Nice work,” Scott finally said with an approving nod. He stowed the ersatz instrument against the wall with the other projects.

A few days later, a student in the other drums unit asked why Doug’s science project was there. Scott never said anything about it to me. In my final report card, though, he leveled similar charges as my other teachers about my attitude, along with an atypical note: “Finally, maybe Teddy could clear up this rumor of his midterm project being the same one he used in science.”

It was my last year taking drums, and no one cared much about my show-and-tell plagiarism. I received a C+ in bio. I could, it appeared, keep coasting.

Seven years later, just out of college, I found myself living back at home and substitute-teaching English at my old high school. I could spot my fellow ambitious slackers a mile away. An impish eighth grader obnoxiously slapped his drumsticks against his desk in class one day. Turn over a new leaf, kid, I wanted to warn him. Except he wasn’t the one subbing at his alma mater for $95 a day.

That was a wake-up call. I moved out, took writing more seriously, did away with the canis jokes. And now, every once in a while, I find myself near a drum set. Sticks in hand, my muscle memory kicks in, and I bang out the intermediate rock beat I learned two decades ago. It’s fun, but I’m always a little sad that that’s all I know how to do.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine” and “Kapitoil.”

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